There are other possible methods. We feel any method MUST be able to be hand-countable! Thus our second meeting was a very brief over-view of these popular methods, with a focus on a hand-count demonstration.

We focused on Ranked Choice Voting in this meeting with an eye to the ability to hand-count. We easily found the difficulty and challenge of counting RCV in a 20-ballot, multi-race demonstration count. We point out that RCV cannot be hand-counted at the poll or precinct levels because if there is no way to know if there is a 51% clear winner in the first choice run-off unless you have all the ballots together and counted for a given race. Even in local races, ballots could never be hand-counted at a poll for a final hand tally, per poll, before the ballots leave any poll. This is a security feature, an onsite poll hand-count.

There will be another group meeting before a final recommendation for a specific method of voting is decided.

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1 Comment

While Ranked Choice Voting seems to be a popular “buzzword” of late, the REALITY (as demonstrated here in this meeting) is that, were we to use this voting method, we would NOT be able to conduct a hand count and instead would be forced to rely upon machines. It should go without saying, but I’ll mention it anyway, that it would also be impossible to conduct a hand counted audit of any complex ballot or large precinct. Idk who is pushing this voting method so hard, or why, but it seems to have a lot of money behind the campaign and fails to properly explain these VERY critical flaws. I do wish people would better inform their opinions before they go around parroting what some organization told them. This is one of the reasons I very much appreciate TBE- because we are encouraged to do our due diligence in vetting all of these different aspects in order to find the best methods and practices. IMO RCV is not a viable voting method option for the aforementioned reasons, and other additional reasons as well.